Trying to Improve Silence by Sentences

Decay and Spirit

Filmmaker Bill Morrison’s work is extraordinary. Taking old film that has tarnished and decayed over the years, he creates collages that weave in a bigger narrative. The footage is left as found, letting time lend a hand to the artistic decisions.

Morrison’s films are not only a meditation on decay but on the spirit of film living on with a new life and context, no matter how ancient and mangled.

Classical music is taken some two hundred years or more from its original life and context. The world has changed dramatically since these pieces’ inception. Decay, while it isn’t something you can see like in Morrison’s films, is still apparent.

And yet the spirit still lives on. We are drawn to listen to this music in concerts, on Youtube, wherever. There is something about it, like Morrison’s films, that manages to find a way to speak to us through the decay.